


i don't care about the sex dude can you just put amygdala's rag doll back on

by jesimiel



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical The Corruption Content (The Magnus Archives), Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), Character Study, Gen, also sorry for all this 2nd person stuff recently i just like it, anyway i think this is technically canon compliant? if it isnt i dont care, feels personal, formatting and macbeth reference inspired by 'blunt not the heart' by kealpos, read it if you like melanie, specifically wrt the mouth at one point, ughh worm guy i like him, yeah thats it i think, yeah whatever. nothing worse than mag 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27678707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jesimiel/pseuds/jesimiel
Summary: one week after, your stomach hurts.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 58





	i don't care about the sex dude can you just put amygdala's rag doll back on

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on tumblr [here](http://jordankennedy.tumblr.com) i'm an ironic timothy hodge hate blog now. everyone has dick worms dipshit they came free with your one night stand

CAST OF CHARACTERS

\- TIMOTHY HODGE, ~~freelance graphic designer~~ ~~professional partier~~ ~~a very lonely man~~ king of the flesh hive  
\- JANE PRENTISS, ~~cashier at a magic shop~~ ~~practicing witch~~ ~~a very lonely woman~~ queen of the flesh hive  
\- HARRIET LEE, ~~art student~~ ~~unwilling victim~~ ~~not lonely enough~~ love interest  
\- Michael (better known as the DISTORTION), ~~the throat of delusion incarnate~~ ~~it-is-not-what-it-is~~ ~~technicolor fractal freak~~ herald of madness  
\- SASHA JAMES, ~~archival assistant~~ ~~brilliant and doomed~~ ~~destructively curious~~ omen of death  
\- Jonathan Sims, our NARRATOR (and nothing but our narrator)

* * *

when you are nine years old, you become interested in insects. they’re fascinating things, really—all segmented bodies and scuttling legs—and they’ve never scared you like they do your mother. you put the cicadas back on the tree trunks from where they’d fallen, you let junebugs and wasps and those big shiny beetles that make you think of jewels climb up and over your feet and legs, you dig for earthworms in the spring until you have enough to fill a whole drinking glass with and then stick your hand inside to feel them squirm against your skin. your mum looks at you weird when she sees you do that last one, though. you don’t do it in front of her, after that. the other kids at school call you a gross weirdo when they see you with caterpillars riding on your shoulders or ants crawling about on your arms but you kind of don’t care, because at least they’re paying attention to you. they don’t do that very often, so you’ll take what you can get.

when you are eleven years old, you have a string of forced group projects at school—four of them in four different classes! you don’t mind. no, you don’t care. you like school, even though nobody else seems to, and you can ignore the way that for three of those four projects, nobody had offered to work with you, and your teacher had to ask. you can ignore it. you don’t care.

when you are thirteen years old, you get lost in the woods. it’s late summer and the fog is thick, the day’s rain evaporating into a blanket of mist, and the warm, squishy moss coating the ground makes a strange noise against the soles of your shoes. the forest looms above you almost hungrily, the small spaces between the lush trees providing you with only little slivers of overcast gray sky. the woods hate you, you know this. there’s no monster chasing you but your own solitude. these woods _eat_ only children with no friends and busy parents and you swallow the names in your mouth before you can shout them in desperation—you don’t remember who they belong to. who is marina, again? who are jacob and alice? you’re not sure. there’s just… you, and the trees, and the fog, and the line of fat black ants meandering across the ground. you follow them for a few steps. they turn, and you do too, walking faster and faster, the path of insects unending, until all at once the ants are gone and you’re at the tree line facing a field and marina and jacob and alice (your cousins, idiot, _idiot_ ) are yelling your name into the forest in varying degrees of panic. there is one ant remaining at your feet, and you thank it for helping you reflexively before you feel a bit stupid. the ant doesn’t crawl away until you say it, though.

when you are sixteen years old, you do not get invited to the school dance. you… don’t _think_ that you care that much? no, no, you don’t care. you hadn’t really expected to get asked, anyway—you still hold the reputation of “that kid who plays with bugs” and it isn’t as though you even like any of your classmates like that, so, whatever. you don’t care. you don’t. 

when you are twenty years old, you spend two days scrubbing mold off of your windows. you don’t know _why_ there’s mold on your windows—it’s been a dry summer and you have the fortune of having a landlord that actually does keep up with the building maintenance. it’s not the thick, fuzzy mold that grows on the raspberries you always buy and never eat, but more of a black, spotty mildew that creeps up the glass from the edges inwards, slowly blocking out your view of the street below. what’s bothering you, though, is the fact that it seems to be on the _inside_ part of the window—the bit that’s in your apartment, facing you. it’s on every single window you can see and about a week and a half after you notice it, you snap, using an entire can of glass cleaner and ruining two washrags to scrub them so hard you think they’ll crack. your skin crawls with the mere _thought_ of the filth creeping into your apartment and you’ll be damned if you see it back--at least, that’s what you tell yourself. the truth is that sometimes you just sort of stare at it, and wonder what it’d be like if the flat was your body, the glass your skin, and the mold blanketing you inside. it makes you itchy.

when you are twenty-seven years old, you sleep with harriet lee, and everything falls apart.

* * *

[The curtain rises. A large piece resembling a box is free-standing on the far left of the stage; a young man sits on the floor, his back against the right side of the box and his legs stretched out in front of him. This is TIMOTHY HODGE, our protagonist.]

[A voice is heard from offstage to the right—or was it to the left? It’s fairly deep and smooth, a voice made for radio. Its source is never seen, but it is loud enough to echo slightly around the theater. This is Jonathan Sims: our NARRATOR, and nothing but our narrator.]

NARRATOR  
How now, upstart?

TIMOTHY  
Step off.

NARRATOR  
Not feeling very talkative today, I see. 

[A pause.]

NARRATOR  
You seem bored.

TIMOTHY  
Yeah, all my friends are busy. No fun doing stuff if you’re by yourself.

NARRATOR  
You could go out somewhere, find someone to bring home.

TIMOTHY [faux-nonchalantly]  
Look, see, the loneliness isn’t the secret. The loneliness is the… I don’t know, the set dressing. The stage upon which the love grows, and festers, and eventually begins to rot. The love is not the cure for the loneliness, just the medicine for it.

[A woman’s voice comes from behind the box. This is HARRIET LEE, the protagonist’s paramour.]

HARRIET  
A bit grim, isn’t it?

[TIMOTHY straightens up a bit, turning his head to search for the source of the voice.]

HARRIET [stepping out from behind the box, walking over to stand in front of TIMOTHY]  
The love is the alcohol to the loneliness’ depression. The balm to the burn that does not blister over. 

TIMOTHY [looking up at her]  
Or something.

[TIMOTHY stands up. HARRIET takes him by the hands, and they begin to dance a simple waltz across the stage. It is a slow, halting thing that follows no audible music, but they seem to be enjoying it.]

HARRIET  
You are lonely?

TIMOTHY  
Yes. And you?

HARRIET  
No. 

[TIMOTHY makes a _hm_ noise.]

TIMOTHY  
Unafflicted, then.

HARRIET  
The _love_ is the affliction, my dear. Love is the malady. The sickness. The corruption.

[Their dance continues.]

TIMOTHY  
Would I be happier with the loneliness?

HARRIET  
No. You live and breathe to love, to _be_ loved. But that is what should frighten you most.

[A pause. They are still dancing, but are falling slightly out of step with each other, as though TIMOTHY is dancing to music that HARRIET cannot hear.]

HARRIET  
You do hear it, I know. It sings to you as not to me.

TIMOTHY  
Hear what?

HARRIET  
No matter. To hear it is to be saved, according to some. Not to hear it is to be torn asunder.

TIMOTHY  
Shouldn’t _I_ be reassuring _you?_ You’re the one who got mugged in an alleyway.

HARRIET  
Yeah, but that doesn’t really matter.

TIMOTHY  
Sorry, I’m losing track of the metaphor.

HARRIET [amusedly]  
Don’t worry, there isn’t one.

[HARRIET suddenly collapses to the floor, appearing, for all intents and purposes, to be quite dead. TIMOTHY stands still, frozen in shock.]

NARRATOR  
Ah... perhaps a different choice of entertainment next time.

[The curtain falls.]

* * *

one week after, your stomach hurts.

yeah, see, it’s funny that after everything that happened, that’s what finally clued you in that something was off. you honestly did think you were just sick at first—you’d been to an unfamiliar bar the night before it started and you were _really_ on the fence about how much you trusted their food—but it didn’t go away. didn’t get particularly _worse_ , either, which was also concerning, albeit in a different way. and then you remembered.

believe it or not, you’re not _actually_ that oblivious to clues from context. something is wrong. food poisoning doesn’t feel like something inside of you is _squirming._

you’re itchy. you hardly even notice rolling up your jacket sleeves and scratching mercilessly at the skin of your arms until you begin to bleed because it doesn’t _do_ anything, doesn’t alleviate the feeling of what you _know_ is there, deep down, the _things_ writhing against your bones. 

three weeks after, you give your statement to the magnus institute. 

you wouldn’t really consider yourself an authority on what counts as a ghost story, and you’re not a hundred percent sure what you saw was _paranormal_ , exactly, because worms _do_ exist in nature, but you just… you have a feeling. they welcome you readily enough, anyway, when you shamble in the front door at nine in the morning on a tuesday. the pretty, red-haired receptionist gives you a friendly smile that you do manage to return, though you can tell she doesn’t put much stock in your sincerity. your shaking hands make you drop the ballpoint pen she gives you three times before you manage to get your signature on the sign-in sheet, and you end up misspelling it anyway, but you don’t think she notices. her nameplate reads _rosanne marshall._ her fingernails are painted purple.

the head archivist is a severe-looking older woman with a teal cardigan and a pair of reading glasses on a long gold chain. she has sharp hazel eyes and hair that was likely once brown but has since gone pewter-gray, drawn into a thick bun at the back of her neck, and she looks much cleaner than you feel. she looks at you for a few moments in a vaguely appraising manner before doing something with her mouth that makes it flatten into a perfectly straight line and turning on her inch-high heel, waving you brusquely along. you follow her, feeling bizarrely chastised. 

she leads you to a room in the archives that’s small, about eight meters square, sparsely furnished with a wooden desk and a brightly lit reading lamp in the middle of it. she slides you a form to fill out—the usual things, name and age and all of that—as well as a small stack of lined paper and a large, ornate fountain pen. the thing is beautiful, you suppose, the ivory of it carved intricately with a greek key pattern that makes you think of clusters of watchful eyes. you stare at it, fascinated, until you realize she’s been speaking to you, and you snap your head up to focus on her. she tells you to write down your experience, and you nod. she fixes you with that appraising look once more before she leaves.

you do as she asks, obviously. you find yourself scribbling faster and faster as you go on—desperate to reach the end of your story but unwilling to leave without expelling every detail onto paper. the pen grows feverishly warm in your shivery grip until your palm grows unbearably itchy, forcing you to switch to your right hand and turning your already-wobbly writing into a nigh-unreadable scrawl. you aren’t sure how long you’ve been there—there are no clocks in the room. 

you finish, finally, _finally._ the head archivist walks in within ten seconds of you dropping the fountain pen as though it’d burnt you, and she’s there to scoop it up deftly before it skitters off the edge of the desk to the floor. she asks you to look at her, and you do. she asks you if you’ve told her everything. were her eyes always that shade of green? 

you tell her the truth, as if you had a choice, which is that you haven’t. she doesn’t ask you to elaborate, so you don’t. she stares at you for a very long moment, gaze roving over you, and you feel your skin crawl in its wake. you shudder involuntarily, hands flying up to itch at your prickling arms, and she stops. the pressure lifts. you let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding.

_can i ask you a question?_ the words are out of your mouth, unbidden, as though she’d dragged them out with a fishhook. she has the gall to raise her eyebrows before nodding, once, in concession.

_you may._

you look down, pondering for a moment.

_am i going to die?_

she shifts her weight thoughtfully and crosses her arms in a pointedly prim manner, gleaming eyes fixing on a point on the ceiling above your head. she looks as though she’s thinking quite hard, and you realize all of a sudden that you don’t actually _want_ her to answer. in fact, you desperately want to get _away_ from her, to be out of this room and out of this building and out of view of all the eyes carved onto the fountain pen on her hand. you’re scratching at your arms again, you notice detachedly, harder than before, and it hurts, but you don’t stop, _can’t_ stop.

the head archivist seems to pick up on your distress, as instead of answering your question, she simply looks back to you and sighs.

_you are free to leave, mr. hodge._ you think your worm-ridden flat is the only building in your life that you’ve left faster than the magnus institute.

it’s true that you hadn’t told her everything. you didn’t _lie,_ obviously—you’re not sure you even could have—but you didn’t tell her about the itching. the squirming in your stomach. the fact that you sort of _like_ it. no, you saw how she looked at you. you saw what she did when you asked.

she already knows.

* * *

TIMOTHY [pacing the stage anxiously]  
What did she _mean_? What song am I to hear that others are deaf to? 

NARRATOR  
The “ear-worm” idiom makes an unwelcome guest of itself.

[TIMOTHY stops pacing.]

TIMOTHY  
Shut up.

[He returns to pacing. He begins to itch at his arms.]

TIMOTHY  
Something is wrong. The pestilence has hold of me, I know it does—hers, likely, yes, but… 

NARRATOR  
Perhaps it would do you good to talk about it.

TIMOTHY [distressed]  
I don’t know what happened. I mean, I’m sure she’s dead, but I don’t—

[He stops again, this time in the middle of the stage. He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and turns towards the audience, speaking directly to them for the first time.]

TIMOTHY  
Let me start from the beginning. I work as a designer…

[The lights begin to dim and the curtain falls as TIMOTHY recites his [statement](https://snarp.github.io/magnus_archives_transcripts/episode/006.html). Eventually, his voice fades as well, and we are left in silent darkness.]

* * *

you manage to find a new flat after yours burnt down, a cheap thing you can still barely afford to keep, so you’re not… _technically_ homeless, not really, but it sort of feels like you are. you’re never _there_ , you just—wander, your feet carrying you and the things that now call you home directing you. 

your new flat is in archway. it feels like hallowed ground.

more things itch. it’s just your arms, at first, but it spreads to your shoulders and chest, your wrists and stomach and thighs, until every inch of you crawls continuously. you don’t even bother buying bandages for the scratches you give yourself—it’s a miracle none of them ever get infected, with your new propensity for untied shoelaces and the sort of exploring that gets you sprawled out in mud puddles—and little spots of blood dot your long sleeves. you unfocus your eyes and stare at your arms in the low light of the nighttime street and fancy you can see the fabric shifting. perhaps you can.

you honestly aren’t sure if you’ve actually developed an… _aversion_ to washing or if you just sort of stopped caring as much. either way, you stop brushing your teeth.

your stomach hurts all the time, now, the pain rolling in writhing waves. you don’t eat very much anymore, but you’re never _hungry_. or, well. you _are_ hungry, but you don’t know what for. certainly not for whatever’s rotting in your refrigerator—you respect its right to do so too much to try to eat it.

you’re not quite sure what you actually _do_ when you’re not wandering the comfortingly dirty back alleys of the city in the dark like a lunatic. you’ve pretty much dropped off of all your social media—not as though you really had much of a presence online anyway, but the meager accounts you do have lay gathering digital dust. you don’t bother with print books, either, since all the ones you own you’ve read already, and nobody smart would let your grimy, disheveled self into a library. you… _seem_ to still be working—at least, you haven’t been evicted yet, so you can assume your rent’s being paid, but you lost your drawing tablet in the fire, and you can never remember what the new jobs were, anyway, or even who they were for.

you don’t buy groceries anymore, and on the rare occasions you’re inside, you’re mostly content to sit and listen to the cars go by on the street below, occasionally dragging your nails down your prickling arms.

you’ve gained a newfound appreciation for the rain. when the summer storms come and the itching worsens you sit on your building’s front step instead of in your living room, letting the sun-warmed droplets roll down your face and neck, soaking you through. you suppose this is how earthworms must feel.

sometimes you worry that something is coming _out_ of you. a little bump will rise in your skin and it’s always just a spot of acne but you’ll drive yourself mad for a day or two anyway with the surety that _this_ time, _this_ time it will be one of those pale, slender _things_ finally burrowing out of where you _know_ they lie in wait beneath your flesh and the very worst part of it all is that somewhere, beneath the pain and fear, is a bolt of thick, cloying, sickening _excitement._

your hands are horrifically dirty—you can’t remember the last time you scrubbed beneath your nails—but you open your mouth and stick two fingers inside anyway, using the middle one to hold it open and pushing the index one back until the tip of it presses against something in the back that _moves_ , undulating gently beneath your tonsils, and you can’t tell if it’s some sort of twitchy muscle that’s _supposed_ to be there or if it’s one of those little white worms—and if it was, if it _is_ , you’re not sure if you actually mind. 

you think that she’s been following you for a while—you keep catching glimpses of red dresses disappearing around corners, keep finding little silver worms that pop beneath the soles of your boots—but you only meet the hive-queen at the end of the summer, right before the leaves begin to turn. you’re taller than her, but only barely, and her hair is the exact same shade of black as yours. she’s wearing a red dress with spaghetti-strap sleeves and nothing else, and the first thing you do is ask her if she’s cold. she says no, and she laughs, but you don’t think she’s laughing _at_ you.

* * *

[A spotlight trains on a figure at the back of the stage, far behind TIMOTHY. Her face is in shadow, but she has long, dark hair and is wearing a red dress. This is the queen of the Hive—the lady JANE PRENTISS.]

NARRATOR  
You have a visitor.

[JANE shifts in place, making noise. TIMOTHY notices her, seemingly for the first time, and whirls around to look at her.]

TIMOTHY  
Speak, if you can; what are you?

[A rasping, dragging female voice echoes across the stage, emanating from somewhere in the light rigging instead of from the woman, but even so, she commands the space in a way TIMOTHY does not.]

JANE  
A sister.

TIMOTHY [warily]  
No sibling of mine.

JANE [ignoring him]  
How do you feel?

TIMOTHY [uncertainly]  
I—I don’t know. Bad, I guess?

JANE  
Pity. Tell me more.

TIMOTHY [as though he has been waiting for the opportunity to speak freely, but is floundering upon being presented with it]  
How do I feel—how do I feel. I feel… I am…

[He trails off as though he has forgotten what he has meant to say. He begins to scratch at his arms through the jacket he’s wearing, barely seeming to realize he’s doing it at all.]

TIMOTHY [decisively]  
I… itch. All the time. Something is _crawling_ in me, and I don’t know what.

JANE  
Let me see.

[She steps forward slightly. TIMOTHY removes his jacket, stretching one arm to his side for JANE and the audience to see. Something beneath the skin is squirming. It is not a special effect.]

JANE  
You look wonderful.

TIMOTHY  
Your reassurance doesn’t mean as much as you think it does. 

JANE  
Do you want it out?

TIMOTHY  
I don’t… I don’t know. Perhaps I don’t.

[He puts his jacket back on.]

JANE  
Uncertainty suits you not. You should not lie awake as you do, struggling to understand—you must allow yourself the confusion, as it comes before the truth, always. And take your jacket off. Look at what you become.

TIMOTHY  
I am afraid to think what I have done;  
Look on’t again I dare not.

[JANE steps closer, slightly threateningly. TIMOTHY inches back.]

TIMOTHY [trying in vain not to sound frightened]  
Get away from me.

JANE  
Infirm of purpose! 

[JANE keeps walking forward. TIMOTHY keeps walking backwards, until his back is against the box setpiece and JANE is mere inches from him. We see her in all of her glory, now—worms wriggle in and out of the holes carved through her skin.]

JANE  
Give me the daggers; the sleeping and the dead  
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood  
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,  
I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal;  
For it must seem their guilt.

[JANE withdraws, and stalks off behind the box setpiece. The heavy steps of her bare feet make loud knocking sounds on the wooden stage. TIMOTHY sinks to the floor, shaking, ending on his knees in fear and despair.]

TIMOTHY  
Whence is that knocking?  
How is't with me, when every noise appalls me?  
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.  
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood  
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather  
The multitudinous seas in incarnadine,  
Making the green one red.

[He quickly gets to his feet and walks offstage right. There is a long pause, before JANE emerges from behind the box setpiece. She leans against it casually, staring offstage in the direction that TIMOTHY has exited.]

JANE [amusedly]  
All hail, Timothy. Thou shalt be king hereafter.

[JANE walks to the center of the stage, and sits down with her legs crossed. There is a pause.]

NARRATOR  
A fine Lady Macbeth, you make.

JANE [mildly sarcastically]  
My thanks.

[The curtain falls.]

* * *

_she_ may not be a fool chasing fractals, but you seem to be, as of late. or, perhaps the fractals are chasing _you_. things full of smiles follow you down side streets, menacing your dreams on the rare occasion you manage to catch some sleep, and every other building you pass by on the street seems to have a yellow door.

the beginning of the end is in the autumn. you trip on a crack in the sidewalk and your hand-eye coordination’s shot to hell so you don’t get your arms up in time to catch yourself and you fall on your face like an idiot and even though you knock a tooth clean out, you don’t bleed. you stare at the little thing in your hand before you run your tongue over the place it should be, and there’s no new opening. you do it again, just to make sure. there’s something _in_ the empty place, poking its head out exploratorily, slightly smaller around than your tooth was. something… gently wriggling. 

your first instinct is to yank it out, or maybe to bite it in half. you consciously stop yourself from doing either, and don’t give yourself the opportunity to dissect _that_ decision—you just pick yourself up, put your lost tooth in your jeans pocket, and start walking back to your flat to examine your mouth in the mirror again. the worm stays between your teeth as you do, occupying the gap between your left canine and your second molar. you are very careful not to close your mouth in such a way that would cause it harm.

you’re… a bit surprised they’d chosen your mouth as their egress point, though. based on context, you were sort of expecting, uh, somewhere else. _that_ thought makes your stomach twinge again. you much prefer them making a home of the spaces between your teeth.

you look, simultaneously, the best and worst you have in years. your eyes are bloodshot and rung with bruised skin as weeks of sleeplessness blooming from many-legged dreams finally begin to show, your lips chapped and cracked to the point of bleeding. your hair is an untrimmed and greasy mess, your cheeks are dotted haphazardly with oily spots of acne—and you are _beautiful,_ entrancingly so, every inch of you aglow with a love you’ve never known. you stare at your haggard reflection unblinkingly, running shaky, worshipful fingertips over the inside-out punctures where worms slowly eat little tunnels through your lips and cheeks and tongue.

your stomach still hurts. you wonder if you’re going to explode. god, _harriet_. that seems like so long ago. barely a year and you’ve changed so much—or perhaps you haven’t. perhaps you’ve always been a… a home, or meant to be one. perhaps this pitted hollowness has always been you.

you pass by a homeless woman on the street right at the beginning of winter. she’s clearly tired and cold, but she smiles haggardly at you anyway, her chin-length blonde hair choppy—clearly a self-done trim. you can almost taste her loneliness. you give her a twenty pound note and four white worms that make their way out unbidden from under your fingernails, and you leave with a slightly more genuine smile on her face. 

you know they begin to burrow in immediately, but you also saw her wearing gloves, and you know that she won’t notice right away. you’re almost three blocks down when you hear her scream. the sound of it, the shriek of utter terror, makes your chest buzz like a wasp’s nest with squirming guilt, even as your veins curl in on themselves unbidden in unfettered adoration. 

you pass the same street a few days later. the woman is gone, but there’s a large, deep black-brown stain on the pavement that wasn’t there before. distantly, you pity her. she’d been desperate for love—and now she’ll never know it. not like you do.

there’s other people on the street, you know that, but nobody comes to investigate when you shout nonsense to yourself until your voice goes raw, trying to copy the song underneath your skin, listening to it echo against concrete walls, or when you screw your eyes shut and cough up worms for straight hours, the noise of it so deeply wet and rattling that it makes you cringe in a mixture of reverence and shuddering disgust. you’re not sure if they’re crawling out of your throat or if they’re wriggling their way up from your stomach. 

you don’t know what leads you to the abandoned pub on azalea close, or what drives you to stay there, when all you’ve done for almost a year is wander restlessly. it’s utterly empty, at least, and fairly large, big enough for you to hold your arms out and whirl around, dancing to the rhythm of the music in your veins that only you can hear. 

the worms spread, slowly, slowly. burrowing in and out through your skin until no part of you is left devoid of slimy, squirming life. you find a place to sit and you let them, watch them do so—their movement is intriguing, reminds you of hours spent observing whatever crawling things you’d managed to scoop up into a jar—and think of the sound of eggs being dropped onto stone floors.

the man enters the building through a door you don’t remember being there, but you ignore it—you’d never looked too closely. he is tall, very tall, with blonde hair that falls over his thin shoulders and frames a smile that you have trouble looking directly at. he doesn’t give his name, but you don’t think he actually needs one. he steps in front of where you sit and crouches down, his long legs folding in a way they definitely should not, and you scoot back and away, pressing your back as hard against the wall as you can. 

he isn’t fazed, and shifts forward so that his face is close. he grins and wrinkles his nose, or at least you think he does—his expression twists and folds in on itself until it doesn’t even look like a face at all, and you turn your head so you can’t see him. the action dislodges several little crawling things that land in the curls of his hair, but he doesn’t seem to care. he laughs, and it’s quiet, but still you resist the urge to clamp your hands over your ears—there’s enough holes in them, now, that it likely wouldn’t be of much use anyway.

his hand supports his weight against the wall behind you as he leans in further, until his nose nearly brushes yours. his other palm cups your chin and he turns your face towards his and you can tell that his hand is not a hand—it _looks_ like one, you think, but it’s heavy and cold where it touches you and the worms that squirm out to meet it recoil from the tactile static. his swirling eyes search your face for a long second, and you can’t get any words out past the writhing in your throat. it reminds you of the gaze of the head archivist, so long ago now. 

_you’ll do just fine._

he gives you a kiss on the nose that gives you a wave of pins and needles, making your whole body flinch and sending another cascade of worms falling to the ground, and he stands to leave. he combs a hand nonchalantly through his hair, the worms tangled in it dropping out forlornly, and you watch him stride back to the yellow door that never has existed in the back wall of the building, open it, and step through. and then he is gone, and the handful of worms he’d shaken out of his hair lay in tightly curled spirals on the concrete floor.

* * *

[The curtain rises. The box setpiece has been moved to the other side of the stage, and TIMOTHY is once more leaning against it, this time the left side. He clutches his stomach in what appears to be great distress.]

NARRATOR  
Ah, what seems to be the problem?

TIMOTHY [strained and forced]  
Oh my God, fuck _off._

NARRATOR  
It does seem to be a personal failing, yes? Surely nothing I have done.

TIMOTHY [strained and forced]  
Not worthy, I suppose. Not… what, _devoted_ enough? Forgive me if I did not exactly _rejoice_ at the hollowing-out of my flesh, the replacement of my humanity with a hive of hungry larvae. Into what will I pupate? Into what will I bloom? 

[TIMOTHY doubles over with a pained noise as though in punishment for his insolence, looking up again a moment later.]

TIMOTHY [breathing heavily]  
Who do I address? The irony is not lost. To begin with a love inalienably human, a balm for the burn of the iced-over solitude, and to end as such, loved by the many squirming thousands that make their home of me. I wished for a lessening of pain, and not a… recontextualization, but such seems to be the way of these forces. To be turned inside out with anxious anticipation of the unknowable.

[A long pause.]

TIMOTHY [through gritted teeth]  
Jesus God, who cares. It doesn’t even _matter._

[Another long pause. From somewhere far offstage, DISTORTION’s echoing laugh can be faintly heard.]

[Enter SASHA JAMES, archival assistant, from stage left, walking purposefully. She holds a fire extinguisher in front of her, nozzle extended. She stops directly in front of the still-seated TIMOTHY, aiming the extinguisher directly at him.]

NARRATOR  
An end approaches.

TIMOTHY [tiredly]  
Yes.

SASHA  
Wicked thing! Quickly, quickly, divulge what disease has ravaged you, that I may not fall victim to it as you have done.

TIMOTHY  
Be you loved?

[She pauses, confused.]

SASHA  
Um, I think so.

TIMOTHY [laughingly, bordering on hysterical]  
Then you are already dead. Let it be said that to be loved is the greatest disease of all.

[The curtain falls. There is a long, long silence, punctuated only by the hissing noise of SASHA’s fire extinguisher, and another round of giggles from DISTORTION, both of which, too, eventually fade. The lights go out.]

[Another long pause.]

NARRATOR  
And so it ends. 

DISTORTION [amusedly]  
Well, no, it doesn’t. She still has to give her statement.

NARRATOR  
Mmm. So _he_ ends, then.

DISTORTION  
Yes. 

[A pause.]

DISTORTION  
I’m trying to help, you know.

NARRATOR [dismissive]  
Hmph. If you say so.

[The lights in the theater turn on. The audience begins to file out. The story is at its close.]

[If you look, very close, you will see a few white worms littering the stage.]

**Author's Note:**

> [supplementary listening](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7kJWQA2dl31FvixfsM57fD?si=To8kubYBSsGlS43IeQdynA)


End file.
